Knowing (DVD)

Knowing is an odd movie. It’s almost like a small, thinky sci-fi flick, but done on a big budget and with Nicolas Cage at the centre looking gormless. The film has a superb hook. A time capsule is dug up after 50 years and inside is a sheet of numbers that Nicolas Cage works out relate to the dates and number of victims of every major disaster in the past five decades. There are only a couple of dates left, and then the letters EE. What is EE, who are the weird people who keep lurking around Cage’s kid and are the future dates accurate anyway?

All this could have made for a typical action blockbuster, and you get the impression from the featurettes that this is how it started out. However when director Alex Proyas came onboard, it became something far more interested in philosophy, apocalyptic mythology and going in directions most movies wouldn’t dare. While Proyas had a major hit with I, Robot, Knowing is far closer in tone to his wonderful Dark City, except less successful in exploring its admittedly weighty themes.

It’s certainly not a bad movie, but it is an unusual one, and to be honest a lot of people will have a problem with the end, when things go in a very peculiar and far more explicitly sci-fi direction. It’s an ending that’s more successful in theory than in practice, working intellectually even while it’s emotionally more problematic.

To get the most out of this film you basically need to ignore what you might have thought this film was going to be from the typical action movie trailers and instead go into it expecting a far more curious type of film, which is interested in asking fairly deep philosophical and religious questions, even if it’s not as good at answering them. And on a less weighty level, it has a few superb action set-pieces, including a Children Of Men-like single-take plane crash, and an impressively kinetic train derailment.

The DVD comes with a small but interesting selection of special features. Things kick off with an audio commentary with Alex Proyas. He’s an interesting guy and it’s obvious he’s done a huge amount of research into the themes of the movies, giving plenty of interesting thoughts on the religious and apocalyptic ideas, as well as the notion of destiny and, of course, the making of the movie. There are also two good featurettes, one a behind-the-scenes effort detailing everything from the genesis of the film to the actual shoot, including a look at the uninterrupted three minute plane crash, with its mix of practical and special effects. The other featurette looks at different ideas about the end of the world, including apocalyptic theories in cultures across the ages, as well as how things have shifted in the modern age from talk of angels being an aspect of the end of times, to aliens. It’s a great addition and certainly explains a lot of what the film is getting at.

It makes for a package that’s well worth a look. It is a problematic film, but also a very interesting one. Admittedly Nicolas Cage is annoying and was a bad choice for a role that needed intelligence rather than slack-jawed gormlessness (although it was probably his involvement that got the makers the $50 million they needed to shoot the film), but it’s rare for an action film like this to pay so much attention to ideas and to genuinely give you something to think about. Some people may not like where the film goes, but it’s worth a look to find out where you stand.

Overall Verdict: An interesting apocalyptic thriller that is worth watching even if it has a few problems, particularly with its ending.

Special Features:
Audio Commentary With Director Alex Proyas
‘Knowing All: The Making Of A Futuristic Thriller’ Featurette
‘Visions Of The Apocalypse’ Featurette
Trailer and TV Spots

Reviewer: Tim Isaac